Dozens of districts delayed the start of school for days, even weeks after the storm hit last month.

All but three districts have reopened, Morath said. He spoke to a packed room at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas at a luncheon Wednesday sponsored by the Dallas Regional Chamber.

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“We educate in the state of Texas roughly the same number of children who are educated by the nation of Canada, and one in four of them have suffered pretty significant disruption to their learning experience and to their lives,” Morath said.

Morath was a Dallas school district trustee before Gov. Greg Abbott chose him as education commissioner in January 2016.

“Our teachers are spending all day with rooms full of kids, who, in many cases, are suffering post-traumatic stress and then they’re going home and demoing their own homes, cleaning out fiberglass insulation, cleaning out drywall and then waking up and getting it all again,” Morath said.

Still room for improvement

Morath also talked about how students across the state are faring. More students are now meeting grade level expectations and the state’s graduation rate – at 89 percent – is the highest Texas has had.

“We have more poor kids today than we ever had," he said. "We have more families of challenge than we ever had, and we got several hundred thousand newly homeless families in the Gulf Coast region. The challenges that we face are daunting.”

Morath was joined on stage by area superintendents, including Dallas’ Michael Hinojosa. Each of them talked about what their district is doing to help students in an innovative way.

“When we look at our results and then we take our English learners, our dual-language parents that are either African-American or white, their results are even much higher than our other groups of kids, and they’re becoming bi-literate,” Hinojosa said.

Forty-four percent – or 70,000 students – in the Dallas school district are considered English language learners. That’s more than the total number of students enrolled in the El Paso or San Antonio school districts.

Hinojosa says the dual-language model is just one example of how a district can help students — whose first language isn’t English – succeed.

In a bittersweet victory for educators seeking edits to the state's proposed A-F system for grading Texas public schools and districts, the House Public Education Committee voted 11-0 Tuesday in favor of a bill that would drastically change the system.

Christina Broussard was trapped in her grandmother's living room for three days during Hurricane Harvey. Rain poured through the ceiling in the bathrooms and bedrooms.

Broussard's a student at Houston Community College. Her grandmother is 74 and uses a wheelchair.

"We had peanut butter, tuna, crackers, we had plenty of water," she remembers. "We were hungry, but we managed. We tried to make light jokes about it — we said we were on a fast." And to pass the time? "We prayed."

Among the hundreds of Harvey evacuees currently in Dallas are children who need to go to school. A small private school stepped up initially, but the district will have to take in more students and provide a long-term solution.